what haven't I understood about JOINs ?

this is a problem that has come up before and I can't figure out what to do about it :

if I have a table 'users' and another table, let's say 'dogs'

I can do

SELECT * FROM users AS t1 LEFT JOIN dogs AS t2 ON t2.uid=t1.uid

but if there is no record in 'dogs' with a uid for a certain user then that user isn't returned in the results

so what do I need to do to return all users, both those with dogs and those without ?
is there some other type of JOIN that I haven't tried yet ?!

thanks

erm scrap that - I just pasted my SQL directly into PHPmyADmin and it works, so it's just me being stupid somewhere else in the code ...